Archive for year 2012

Over the past few years I have had the pleasure to get to know many of the great marketing bloggers I admire so much. And it is amazing how similar we are. We seem to thrive on the relentless pace and challenge of producing consistently great content. Most bloggers do the work out of love, passion, and a drive to make a difference … not for money. In fact, it is very, very difficult to directly monetize a blog.

I love blogging, but as you can imagine, it’s a ton of work. And we might plow hours of work into a piece we’re proud of only to have it considered “old” a week later!

That’s why it is so exhilarating to get an email like the one I received this week:

“I’m sure it’s difficult to know sometimes if you make a difference in this world. You did. Thank you.”

Now THAT is something to keep a blogger going!

You see, on our blogs, we may receive tons of comments, but rarely do we get any feedback. There’s a difference between “I agree with your point” and “Your work is appreciated” or “You are making a difference.”

When was the last time you gave a “virtual hug” to your blogger and tell him or her about your appreciation for their long hours and sacrifices to make their little piece of the world a better and more interesting place?

Valentine’s Day is this week and I think that’s a great time to take a moment, reach out to these hard-working folks, and show a blogger some love. Can we make this the first Hug a Blogger Week?

I’m going to take 10 minutes to drop a note to a few of my favorite bloggers today and just say “THANKS!” How about you?

But despite this weirdness and angst, the data would suggest that people who frequent social networks are a pretty happy bunch. I recently had a post that showed the emotional boost from Facebook was similar to something you would get by being married!

Now, a new study from Pew Research shows that the overall social and emotional climate of social networking sites (SNS) is a very positive. Adult users get personal rewards and satisfactions at far higher levels than when they encounter anti-social people or have ill consequences from their encounters. A nationally representative phone survey of American adults finds that:

85% of SNS-using adults say that their experience on the sites is that people are mostly kind, compared with 5% who say people they observe on the sites are mostly unkind and another 5% who say their answer depends on the situation.

68% of SNS users said they had an experience that made them feel good about themselves.

61% had experiences that made them feel closer to another person. (Many said they had both experiences.)

39% of SNS-using adults say they frequently see acts of generosity by other SNS users and another 36% say they sometimes see others behaving generously and helpfully. By comparison, 18% of SNS-using adults say they see helpful behavior “only once in a while” and 5% say they never see generosity exhibited by others on social networking sites.

At the same time, notable proportions of SNS users do witness bad behavior on those sites and nearly a third have experienced some negative outcomes from their experiences on social networking sites. Some 49% of SNS-using adults said they have seen mean or cruel behavior displayed by others at least occasionally.

Does this match your experience? Do you “get your happy on” when you go to Facebook?

I’m a student of history … probably half the books I read are biographies or something to do with a past era. So today I’d like you to oblige me while I connect the dots between the social media revolution and what appears to be increasing political paralysis in the U.S., India, Greece, and other nations.

My impression is that political leaders of past decades were no less competitive, egotistical, or power-hungry than the politicians of today. They were probably less demographically-diverse, less educated, and less in tune with constituents because of the lag time in communications before the Internet.

It’s hard to compare apples to apples, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume that there has indeed been a shift, and politicians today are less able to find compromise that helps keep a country moving in the right direction. How might we explain the change?

Could there be a paralyzing effect of social media?

Last year I had a fascinating discussion with a bright young man who devised a way to compare the political sentiment on the social web in Iceland with the public positions taken by his country’s politicians. He could then match the data to see which politicians had positions that most closely compared to the sentiment of the nation.

Once the politicians found out about this, they started stopping by his office frequently to compare scores … and change positions if necessary. Today of course, this is possible to do on a minute-by-minute basis.

There is a certain beauty in this. Politicians in a democracy are supposed to be representing the will of the people. Isn’t this real-time feedback exactly what they need?

But I wonder about the possible advantage in a political process 50 years ago when politicians had to use their best judgment instead of real-time “polling” to make a decision. I can imagine leaders in the 1950s locking themselves behind a door and pounding out a compromise without the shifting sands of social media sentiment to contend with.

Wouldn’t it be easier to keep their focus on an issue instead of jockeying for position on Twitter every day?

Wouldn’t it be easier to take an unpopular position (like cutting entitlement programs to balance a budget) if you only had to deal with the outfall every four years instead of every day?

So I could see both sides of this argument, but the one thing we do know is that the social web is not going to go away.

What do you think? In the long-term, will the constant “polling” of social media sentiment analysis contribute to debilitating political paralysis or more enlightened political accountability?

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You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow.
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-Mark Schaefer